E16: Never Do More with Less

What if trying to do more with less is the wrong strategy? Welcome to Invisible Solutions. I'm your host, Steven Shapiro. Each week we tackle your most complex problems using the lenses from my book, Invisible Solutions. If you need the lenses, go to getthelenses.com with that. Let's get started with today's episode. Today I will address the topic of productivity using one of the lenses and then I'll reframe a listener submitted problem. They want to know how can they sell more of a product that they've developed? And I think this is going to be useful for anyone who has anything you want to sell. First, let's start off with the old mantra, do more with less. This seems to be a popular mantra in business. Companies come to me all the time saying, what? We have more work than ever, yet we have fewer people because we had to let them go. They're furloughed, whatever it might be. So the assumption is that we're going to make people faster, they're going to be able to do more, they're going to be able to get more done. And so we just sort of turn up the crank and they're going to get more stuff done. But maybe that's the wrong perspective. Instead of trying to do more with less, maybe you want to do less and get more, do less and get more. And this is the leverage lens, number one, the leverage lens. The leverage lens basically says that what we want to do is put our energies into the areas of the business that are going to have the greatest impact. So if you could only do one thing, what would it be? So the whole concept of trying to do more with fewer resources means that we're stretching people, we're creating stress, and at some point we will actually reduce productivity. But if we ask, how can we do less and get more, we now are going to get people focused on what give them the greatest results. I mean, you've all heard the Pareto principle. Variations of it are, you know, if you only spend 20% of your time, that will give you 80% of the results. What would it be? Where would you focus your energies? Well, that's leverage. And so instead of having everybody work on everything, have them look at what's the 20% that, if they did that well, did it right, would have the greatest impact. So it's one of the things as an entrepreneur that I'm always asking myself, because I could work easily 100 hours a week, I don't want to. So I ask myself each day, what is the one thing two Things, three things at most, that if I did them today, would have been the greatest impact. What would have the greatest impact? So there's 50 things I could do, but there'll be three things that will really unleash a lot of value. And that's where I put my energies. And so I encourage you, no matter what kind of business you have, really start using this leverage lens. Start using this mantra, how do I do less and get more? And if you just use that mindset, it will start to help you unleash a whole new range of opportunities. One thing related to leverage is recognizing that you as an individual, or even you as an organization or team, can't do everything. So in many cases, you need to be able to partner with others. I remember I was in Malaysia and we were having a great conversation, and somebody said to me, before you can multiply, you must first learn to divide. Before you can multiply, you must first learn to divide. And this is really profound. Basically, what that means is if you want to multiply your business, grow your business, increase the size of your business, the best way to do that is to divide your business. Now, that doesn't mean break it up into small parts, but rather what it means is find people who will become excited about, passionate about, committed to your success. Because when you are successful, they are successful. And when you can create that symbiotic relationship, now you have an opportunity to grow, and that is one way to get leverage. That is one way to do less and get more, because you do less, but the ecosystem does more. In some respects, you can look at the way that Apple has created their ecosystem as being very much like this. So they have, instead of trying to have this closed environment, yes, they have a closed operating system, but they have an open environment in terms of others being able to develop apps. And it is that ability to get other developers committed to not so much Apple's success, but their own success through, through Apple is the key. So every time you create an app, yes, you pay Apple 30%, but you still keep a lion's share of the money. And that helps you grow your business, and it helps Apple grow their business. So it's that relationship where you're taking a slice of somebody else's business. And I think this is a really powerful way to think about things. So let's, let's come back to the problem that, that somebody submitted. And I think you're going to see how this all fits together. So a while back, I was contacted by someone who does beautiful photographs, takes photographs Beautiful work, great artist. And what they did was they combined inspirational quotes with these photographs. And what they did, which I thought was really clever, is they weren't just random quotes from dead people, but rather they were also quotes from living authors and speakers. In fact, one of my quotes is on one of their images. And I thought this was a really beautiful, a beautiful way to bring somebody's message to life. And so this individual wanted to find a way of marketing it. So the question was, how can I get more people to buy my product? How can I get more people to buy my product? And in particular, they wanted to know more about marketing techniques. So let's tackle that, let's tackle this and let's just. When I start thinking about something like this, I think about my books, for example. So anytime you publish a book, obviously you want to sell a lot of books. And the way that this question was originally framed from my perspective is it's a numbers game. If I want to sell let's say 10,000 copies of this digital product, well, I probably need to make 100,000 or 200,000 or 500,000 people aware of the product so that I can convert them to a buyer. So it's a large number and it requires a lot of marketing. And the strategy for this would be what people call a funnel. And the whole idea is you get people at the top of your funnel and maybe you hook them with something free, they call it a lead magnet, and you bring them into the funnel and you bring them down and okay, so they got the free item, then we get 2% of those people, we convert them over to buy a copy of this digital product. It's a numbers game. So one of the things that I found when it comes to selling my books, for example, so invisible solutions, it is difficult if you try to sell books one at a time. Look, if you're a famous author, if you are a well known celebrity, for you to be able to sell a massive number of copies, okay, that might work well for you, but for me, I found it to be very difficult. Trying to sell, let's say 10,000 copies of a book is a lot of work because I've got to get 10,000 buyers, 10,000 people to give me a credit card, which means I probably have to have, you know, several hundred thousand people who become aware of the book. So unless you're a big name, that's very difficult. So instead of trying to sell 10,000 copies of a book to 10,000 people, let's use the reduce lens. Now we could Reduce the number of books from 10,000 to a different number. But I actually want to reduce the other half of the equation, which is the I want to sell 10,000 copies of the book, but not to 10,000 people. Reduce it. So instead of selling it to 10,000 people, maybe I sell it to 10 people. Okay, well now what's that strategy? Well, that's a different strategy. That's about bulk sales. If I could sell a thousand copies of a book to 10 people, I now have 10,000 sales. That to me is a very powerful way to start reframing a problem like this. Now, it doesn't work for every product because not every product is going to be a bulk sales opportunity. But if you start to ask yourself, well, how could I reduce the number of people? Or maybe it is even reducing the number of books. So if I said, okay, I don't want to sell 10,000 books, I want to sell 1,000 books, but I don't want to compromise my income, well then maybe what I need to be thinking about is what does a book represent? Maybe a book is not the end, but it's part of something else. Somebody buys a book, but it's a way of hooking them into something else that might be a higher priced service or a higher priced product. So now you can start to see that we're now looking not just at selling books, but we're selling bundles, we're selling services, we're selling other products. Okay, that's a different way to do it. And that really is a key part of my business is I've never looked at a book as my money maker. I've looked at my book as a way of sharing with the world, the way I think sharing with the world my content. So that if somebody reads it and says, whoa, this is powerful, this is going to help me solve pretty much all of our most complex problems. I need more of this. So it's about going deeper. Well, to me the book is just the tip of the iceberg. What else can I do to help companies so that I can go deeper? So you can see that we took what was a question sort of implied. If I want to sell 10,000 copies to 10,000 people, we've now started to shift it a little bit. But you can also see that's a conversation more than just marketing and selling because it's about a business model. It's a much longer conversation. It's a different conversation because if you're just selling a one and done product, well, then maybe you don't have an opportunity to go deeper with your customers. But maybe your customers want more. Again, that's not the case for all products. But if it is the case, well, how can you offer them more? Now you're shifting the business model away from selling a standalone one time product to deeper products, deeper engagement. And these could take a whole variety of different forms. I think that that's a really interesting way to start reframing this is to use that reduced lens to start shifting the way that we look at it. Now one of the things that I talked about before is when we talked about the leverage lens is before you can multiply, you must first learn to divide. In order to do that, we probably need to use the reassign lens. And the reassign lens is number 12. Sometimes what you need to do is find a way of getting somebody else to do the work for you. That's a great way of doing less and getting more. I'm doing less, they're doing more. Together we generate more. So I really love this perspective. You know, there's a lot of different ways to look at this. So for example, some people do that in terms of having joint ventures where they call it affiliate marketing in some circles, where if you're selling a digital product, you give somebody 50% if they sell it and you keep the other 50%. And that's a certainly a great way to go about it. I did similar things for other programs that I've developed. I've had in person courses developed, I've had elearning courses developed, I've had tools developed and in each case we did a revenue share approach. Now I didn't do the development, I didn't do the selling. In some cases I didn't do the delivery. So for the in person course, for example, they first of all, they built the whole training curriculum, the two day in person training curriculum, they trained their trainers and they sold the program and I got a percentage of whatever they sold. In the case of an E learning course that we had developed similar type of thing, I gave them my content, they developed the elearning program, they hosted it, they sold it and I got a percentage of it. So that's a really great way at times to build a bigger pie where other people are becoming successful because of your content or because of your product. And this leads me to another idea that I have for this particular problem because this is someone who is creating products around saying quotes, expressions from speakers and authors. And so let's use the reassign lens here and sort of flip it around a little bit. And maybe instead of using the traditional affiliate relationship where you get somebody to sell a product and you split it 50, 50, maybe you give away the product and you make the money on the back end. Okay, well that's sort of the reduce or eliminate. Like how could I eliminate making money in order to make money? Well, in order to do that, maybe you give away this product, you make it available as many places as you possibly can. And maybe you have a tracking code somehow so that you can see who had actually looked at a particular quote. And if that person went to someone's website and bought from them, well then you get a percentage of that. So instead of getting a percentage of somebody selling your digital product with the inspirational quotes, maybe you get a percentage of a speaking revenue. So let's just use me as an example. If this individual on their product had a dedicated link, a unique link under my name for that expression, and somebody clicked on that link and they came to my site and they hired me for a speech, or they bought a book or they took one of my courses, well then the arrangement might be that I give a kickback of a certain percentage to that individual. Now if you think about a digital product, I'd have no idea what they were looking to charge for this, but let's just say it's a 20, 30, $40 product. But if I sell a speech and they take a percentage, even if it's a small percentage, it would probably be a larger number than if they had to sell a whole bunch of the copies of that product. So of course this is not, you know, as straightforward as trying to just sell a digital product. There's a lot of challenges behind it. But here's the other thing which I want you to get is for every challenge that you surface, every challenge that you come up with and that you start to solve and come up with new solutions, there will be new challenges underneath it. If this is, for example, the way they decide to go where they say we're going to give away the product, we're going to put a code on there for all the people who might have a product of their own that they want to sell and we get a referral fee, well now the question is, how can we make sure that we're getting the money we should get from those referral fees. And I think the bottom line is with all of this is if you take any problem you're working on and you think about it creatively, you're going to find some interesting solutions. On this episode we started off talking about productivity, why you don't want to do more with less, but rather you want to do less and get more. This is the essence of the leverage lens. We also talked about the expression, before you can multiply, you must first learn to divide, which means in order to grow your business, the fastest way to do that is to get others excited about your business and give them a slice of it. Which then led us to the reassign lens and also the reduce lens, where we tackle the problem of trying to sell a product and we use those lenses to come up with a number of different solutions. Hopefully this gave you at least a little bit of a taste of how just a couple of lenses can give you a lot of different insights into a problem. Whatever problem you're working on, I hope you'll take the time to submit it to me. Because each week we try to tackle a problem that someone is having who's listening to this podcast. So if you have a problem that you want to solve, go to Invisible solutions podcast. That's invisiblesolutionspodcast.com and you'll be able to submit your problem. And again, if you want to download the lenses, go to getthelenses. Com and with that, we are at the end of this week's episode. I look forward to being with you next week, and until then, happy problem solving.